


A Meeting With The King

by lokilickedme



Series: The McClary Chronicles Prehistories and Side Stories [1]
Category: Scottish Mythology, Tom Hiddleston - Fandom
Genre: Explicit Language, F/M, History, King POV, King vs Ian, Mention of blood, Referenced Neurodivergent Behavior, Referenced Sex, Referenced violence, Side Story, leading up to SM chapters 9 and 10, mild violence, minor backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-27 12:55:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12081471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lokilickedme/pseuds/lokilickedme
Summary: A McClary Chronicles side story, told from King's point of view. What happened the day the CEO of Monarch Industries got into a kerfuffle with his opposite number in the men's room at Clendon Williams? A retelling of the events leading up to chapter 9 of Samhach Mhiannan, as seen through King's eyes.





	A Meeting With The King

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

Meetings.  I hate fucking meetings.  The city, the people, the suit, the job.  My job, the one I pretend I know how to do, the one done by other people while I sit glaring at the suits on the other side of the table while they look everywhere but at me.

That part I can live with.  But the rest of it is shite.

The drugs mess with my head but they keep me calm, and calm is how they want me.  Calm and intimidating, spare with words but oh so fuckin' generous with the cold smiles.  I'm told they see a wolf when they look at me, half starved and rabid.  Ragged and feral, hiding in the shadows.  The wolf lets you see it, knows you'll either freeze or run.

It has you either way.

It's a fair business tactic, unnerving the competition, and I suppose I do it well enough.

I like that part too.  It's enough to keep me cooperating, every time they call.  Because the wolf in me enjoys it when they freeze, and revels in it when they run.  And there's always whiskey after, to take the cold bite of human interaction off my skin.

There are no wolves in Scotland, aside from me.  An historical fact often blamed on my ancestors.  Took them as pets, the story goes...tamed them down till they were nothing but the sheep dogs that run around on every farm in the valleys.  I'm the last one with wild blood still in me.  The only snarling mad dog running loose in the hills, undomesticated but pedigreed, nameless but branded with the commonest name in the Highlands.  Common because every tongue in Scotland knows it.

_Rìgh._

I'm the fucking king.  Everyone knows me whether I want to be known or not.  I wear the crown on my finger and six hundred years of unwanted nobility on my back, and Scotland expects things from me.  I do my best, but some things I can only give begrudgingly.

This meeting is one of those things.

But I love the sliabh I live on, and so long as I can stay up there, away from people, I'm happy.

But I'm not in Scotland now, and the noise of the city has my ears pinned back.

 

 

I'm sittin' in a posh hotel suite in Philadelphia and I want to be anywhere but here.

No, I'm lying - where I want to be is with a woman.  A woman with a swollen belly who's got the one and only prince of Claighe nestled between her hipbones, keepin' him safe till he's ready to take his claim.  My son, the only McClary on this earth aside from me.  His feet haven't touched soil yet but he'll be king one day, when the current king is gone.

Me.  When I'm gone.

I rest easy now knowing there's one to take my place.

But right now I really want to be with his mother, the girl with the auburn hair and the china blue eyes and the long, long legs.

Which is why the videotape of the Clendon Williams Christmas party gives me such a hard on.

 

Murphy plugs it in and turns the volume down; they want me to know who I'm going to see today, to know the faces that will be staring at me from across the table.  I do better that way, if I've seen a face before.   _Stranger Anxiety_ they tell me it's called.  I get antsy and rude, I'm told.

_Socially unacceptable._

That's what they say, anyway.  I only know that being stared at makes me feel bad and I don't react well to it.  The only person I want looking at me is the girl I slept with last night.

But she's at home and I'm here, puttin' myself into a suit that sits too tight across my shoulders and rubs at my belly wrong.

I hate suits.

But we're all wearin' em, lookin' like a passel of reapers about to head to the funeral home.  Murphy throws me an elastic jobber, points at my head.  More social acceptability, the simple act of tyin' my hair back.  I suppose I look respectable now and he nods as he points the remote at the TV.

The Christmas party is several minutes underway before I see her. 

She were well over six fucking feet tall in her heels and so goddamn beautiful I about swallowed me tongue.

My Mol, before she were mine.

"How old is this?"

"Twenty-fifteen, I think - a big corporate do from two years ago."

Molly in a red dress.  On the arm of that insufferable twat who'd dared to call himself her man.

"Ian Summer."

"What about him?"

"I want him in the meeting today."

"He's not listed on the board of directors - "

_"I want him in the meeting today."_

Declan gave me a look, the only one of them brave enough to.

"Mac - "

"Make it happen, Declan.  I know you can."

"I can, yeah, but why?  I can't just say you want him there."

"You can and you will."

He heaved a sigh, the one I heard so often.  I knew he'd do what I asked.  But to be fair, I wasn't asking...and he knew it.

 

This place weren't meant for me.  The deep carpet under my shiny shoes feels unnatural and I'm unbalanced by it.  Why do people think they need so much space between their feet and the ground?  We're made of earth and all we want is to distance ourselves from it with shiny shoes and thick carpet.  I hate these fucking shiny shoes.

Mirrors on the walls keep showing me someone I don't know, a sheep farmer stuffed in a suit.

He doesn't look like anyone I would pay any mind to.

 _T.A.J. McClary, CEO_ my pass says.  I don't know who that is.

It's the guy in the mirror, I suppose.  A man being paraded into a meetin' to bring fear to the faces across the table.

But it isn't me.

I'm a sheep herder and I miss my dog.  But the pass tells me who I'm meant to be for the day, and the mirror agrees with it.

I stuff it in the pocket of the suit and let the shiny shoes take me out of the building.

 

 

And there he sat, right across the table from me.  One of the faces I was meant to intimidate, though by the cold unconcerned look in his eyes he seemed to be immune to whatever it was I brought to the table.  Molly's ex, the lover that hadn't loved her near enough.  Fucking limpdick stared at me like he knew it would make my nerves hurt.

The fucker even smiled at me.

I knew he had to die.  That smile sealed it.  Die, spill blood, crawl home with his pecker in his mouth, one or all I didn't care.  Everything inside me said it had to happen and I had to do it before he ever ran those goddamn icy eyes over Molly again.  She would be somewhere in the building and he would probably go straight to her as soon as the meeting adjourned.

I could feel it.  I knew he'd do it, just to spite me and upset her.  That smile said so.  He'd probably touch her too, and I would know it as soon as he did.  My skin would crawl and I'd hear it in the back of my head, that little swooshy sound skin makes against skin.  I'd hear it and it would set me so far on edge I'd have to slam my head into a wall to make me ears ring enough to drown it out.

Unless I killed him now.

Or sent him home with his pecker in his mouth, it was all the same to me.

 

I motioned to Sean to call a break and the execs closed their files, wary eyes dartin' back and forth from face to face looking for someone who could give back a reassuring smile.

Nobody could.  Not even the limpdick.

I'd have laughed on my way out if I hadn't been so tightwired to commit murder.

 

  
_"You touch Molly Thompkin ever again and I'll rain hellfire down on you like the grim reaper himself pissin in the eye socket of your rotten skull."_

"What?"

I knew he heard me, I wasn't about to repeat myself to the likes of him.  It were more words than I'd wanted to waste on his worthless ears to begin with.  He stepped inside the mens' room and no sooner had the door swung shut behind us than he turned around to face me.  And he stood there, grinning that smug little asshole grin at me that he'd flashed during the meeting.

"When she's finished slumming and gets her thirst for inbred backwoods dick sated, I'll be there to give the unfortunate result a fair shot at a decent life."

 _No he fuckin' didn't._ He could insult me till the sheep went in the barn but not my Molly, and definitely not my Pod.

I'd meant to bait him but this was far too easy.

And like I always do, I threw the first punch.

 

Murphy came in right about the time Ian's fist was making contact with my left eye, and stepped in between us before I could take another swing.  I'd hoped to at least slam his head into the sink, but the scuffle ended before it got good and started and I had to content myself with watching his blood wash down the drain as I rinsed it from my fist.  The shite was mutterin' like a cunt about his nose being broken as Murph escorted him out.

He came back in a few seconds later, stopping to lean back against a stall door with his arms crossed in front of him, shooting me the stink eye and waiting for me to look at him in the mirror.

"He had it coming, Murph."

"I'm sure he did, Mac.  If for nothin' else than the cardinal sin of having that woman before you."

"He never deserved her."

We fell silent and I dried my hands;  Murph's stare fell to the floor where a few drops of Ian's blood stained the marble and I stepped over, putting the print of my shiny shoe in it.

"After you."

 

I dunno how she managed it, but twenty minutes into the second meeting across town I looked up and Molly was coming into the room.  And about a minute and a half later I were following her down the long hallway to her old office, being led along with my tie wrapped around her hand like a dog on a leash.

There's a reason dogs are the happiest creatures on earth.

And when she locked the door behind us, I would have barked the first act of The Barber Of Seville if she'd told me to.  But my mouth were busy with more important things, and when she started spouting my own language at me I knew one thing and one thing only.

I was happy with my life on the hill.  But off the hill, down here in the noise and the mess and the motion, all that made me happy was her.

As much as I wanted to get back home, the thought of leavin' her behind tore my soul out of my body.

I slammed the desk against the wall to stop its bangin' and ducked down between her legs.  Those long fucking legs, up over my shoulders, openin' to give me everything she trusted me with.  She were moaning and tryin' so hard to say something in Gaelic, words she'd heard me say, words she figured must mean something important.

She were right about that.  But she were saying it wrong and to shut the words out I sent my head somewhere else.

Not home, where my head usually went when noise was too much.  Not my home, leastways.

Hers.

Not her home here in the city though, where I had to wade my way through hell to come see her.  No, she had a new home, it was in my head already.  I knew just where I was going to build it.  And it would be there for her and Pod when they were ready to be with me.

But for now I had to last through a full afternoon of this goddamn meeting.

I made Molly give me her knickers before we parted ways.  She handed them over like a good girl.  They felt good in my pocket, a little bit of calm and comfort to rub my fingers against while I did my job.  And as the meeting dragged on and the suits got more and more nervous, fewer and fewer of them seemed willing to look at me.  Maybe because the more I touched that little slip of silk the more fearsome my stare hit them.  Maybe because they could smell her on me and the scent of mating established me as the undisputed Alpha in the room because God only knew the last time any of them had gotten fucked.  Or maybe I was just done with them all and they knew it.

It was left to me to make the final decision.  The fate of these fuckers was on me.  They'd tried to bully me into selling them my land, to take the village and the farms and everything my people owned for a bit of minerals in the dirt that my sheep shat on every day.  And in the end I just stood up and said,

"Faodaidh tu uile mo dhot a mhic. Bidh mo mhuinntir a 'dol an conaltradh."

I thought one of my guys would translate for them, but nobody did.  They all just got up and followed me out, leaving the other suits to look nervously at each other, wonderin' who the hell won.

 

In the car I took off those goddamn shiny shoes and rubbed at my eye.  It were startin' to ache where that fucker's knuckles caught me at my cheekbone.  Murphy looked at me and started to laugh.

"So how long do we wait to call them?" he asked, rolling the window back up quick so I couldn't toss the shoes out it.  I didn't care if anyone ever called them, but Molly needed her job for a few more months at least.

"After Molly Thompkin has her baby."

They all looked at me.

"And then what?"

I stared out the window at the city.  It were moving past us more so than we were moving through it.

I couldn't wait to go home.

"I don't care," I finally said.  "After she has that baby, you can burn Clendon Williams to the fuckin' ground if you want."  I yanked the pass off my coat pocket and stared at it.

_T.A.J. McClary, CEO._

Dunno who that was, but I were wearin' his suit.

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> *Translation of Gaelic to English: "You can all suck my dick. My people will be in contact with you."
> 
>  
> 
> *Many thanks to @vivianstark for the gorgeous artwork of King - lower image made exclusively for The McClary Chronicles, please don't post anywhere without a credit to the artist and a link back to this fic* (top image manipped by me from a stock internet photo)


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